It ~Nоvеl𝕚ght~ wasn’t even surprising anymore, after watching myself—who used to take care of masturbation with bored indifference—cling to joining with him with blazing passion and boldness.
“When we’re back in Seoul, I’ll buy you a fresh pack.”
Muttering pointlessly into an empty room, I drew on the cigarette. My throat still stung, and the feeling of my lungs tightening made me squint. I didn’t cough, but it didn’t draw smoothly either.
After two or three drags, I hooked the cigarette into the notch of the ashtray. I preferred watching the thin smoke curl up slowly. Depending on the angle it looked gray, then blue—the smoke resembled his eyes.
My thoughts went to him whether I liked it or not. It wasn’t a topic I could dodge.
Last night he was kind, and for my sake—someone without experience—he even held back the urge to run wild. He knotted in me, but from how he reacted, that hadn’t been what he intended either. Besides, I was a Beta, so even if he ejaculated while knotted there was no fear of pregnancy. Contrary to his worries, I hadn’t torn inside, so I didn’t want him to feel excessive guilt or responsibility about it.
He’d even prepared this and that in advance out of concern for me, so as a partner who’d spent the night with me, he was by no means lacking in manners.
But starting last night, nothing revolutionary had changed in our relationship.
Two adults had sex by mutual consent, and I myself wanted that connection and came to this room on my own, so I had no intention of blaming anyone for not getting anything beyond that.
If anything, it was the opposite. I wanted to laugh at and turn away from myself for trying to find hopeful hints or meaning in a hookup driven by sexual attraction.
If that kind consideration came with no explanation attached, then what did it mean? I might be inexperienced in this area, but I wasn’t so deluded and giddy that I’d misunderstand it on my own.
If only I hadn’t known. If only I could have dreamed something stupid and sweet for a while—would I feel any better now, alone in this room, recalling his eyes in the smoke of a cigarette I can’t even properly smoke?
Thinking like that, I already seemed stupid enough.
I picked up the robe draped over the backrest and pressed it to my nose and lips. The cigarette I’d left on the ashtray had burned almost down to the filter. I gently rubbed out a finger segment’s worth of gray ash into the tray and stood up.
Nowhere in the room—not even in the robe he’d taken off and left—could I smell him anymore.
■ ■ ■
He was waiting for me in the back seat, dressed casually rather than in a suit. The sun was completely down, and he was wearing sunglasses inside the car.
I found it odd for a moment, but because he sometimes had a random mischievous streak, I didn’t bother to ask why.
Because of the dull ache still lingering between my legs and the sense that things hadn’t fully closed, I sat a little awkwardly as I tried to settle into my seat. With fresh clarity I felt, in a male Beta’s body, what it meant to have slept with a male Alpha, the way it leaves traces after penetrative sex.
The doorman closed the door and the car pulled out. It was the same driver as the day we went to see Ms. Sukhee Kim.
“I’m sorry.”
Once the car had completely left the hotel area and merged onto the overpass, he opened with something unexpected. I looked back at him, but behind the sunglasses I couldn’t tell where his eyes were.
“You must have been uncomfortable all day.”
“I wasn’t expecting to feel nothing the next day anyway... I’m fine. You really don’t have to worry any more. Resting helped a lot.”
Honestly, being on the receiving end of more consideration from him about my body now would have felt uncomfortable. I wasn’t as unwell or in so much pain as he feared.
Above all, he had nothing to apologize for. We spent the night together because we both wanted to, and I think he did everything with proper manners, softening and opening me even though I wasn’t his lover. An apology would only make me feel like I’d been used by him; if possible, I didn’t want to hear it.
“Seo Ihyeon, you’re sturdy. I thought you’d be a bit more... shaken.”
Tapping my crossed legs with the narrow paper envelope in his hand, he murmured without looking at me.
“I’m glad you’re someone sturdy.”
I couldn’t tell exactly what he meant by “shaken.”
If he meant the wobble where you fail to tell apart sex that naturally follows a confession and exchange of feelings—getting swept up in the mood, having sex on impulse because of each other’s pull—from a one-night stand, and then mistake the intimacy after sleeping together for romantic feeling—
It might not be entirely wrong.
No—more precisely, sex was only the trigger for that wobble, but either way, it was true that my current state was far from stable or calm.
“You just... have to accept what’s happened one way or another, right?”
Whether you like it or not.
Muttering that to myself, I looked out at Hong Kong’s cityscape slipping away in the opposite direction from when we’d arrived.
When I first faced the city, riding Phantom and listening to Prince, I couldn’t have predicted the experiences and emotions that would each fill me with their own colors and textures.
Looking back, from the moment I got to know him, it had been a string of variables I couldn’t foresee or prepare for. Not just the events. The feelings when facing him were the same.
I’d thought meeting Ms. Sukhee Kim would be the biggest event of this trip to Hong Kong, and I thought of myself from a few days ago, feeling a sheepish flutter at a single glance colliding in the rearview mirror. Put nicely, I was naive; put mercilessly, I was emotionally naked, without even a thin sheet to shield myself from danger.
I hadn’t expected it.
I couldn’t say I hadn’t expected at all that what happened last night might be the kind of trigger that would change our relationship, or his stance toward me. I was ashamed of that expectation I alone knew about.
Watching the seatback screen in front with an even tone the entire time, there was nowhere in his demeanor to find any signs of fondness, pull, or affection—any such possibilities.
He handed me the envelope he’d been holding, saying he’d arranged things so I could move quickly through departure once we got to the airport. Inside were a simple document proving VIP fast-track access and a first-class ticket.
“Take tomorrow off. I told them you had the same symptoms as last time, so they’ll understand.”
His cover story hovered deftly between lie and truth.
“I’m fine. Thanks to your concern, I rested well. I think by tomorrow I’ll be completely back to normal.”
On top of the “first class” printed on the ticket he’d given me, getting a day off as someone who had had sex with him felt inappropriate.
I thought I knew what the unease piling up in me with every kindness of his really was.
It wasn’t just the awkwardness of not being used to this kind of luxurious treatment. Inside those kindnesses, I felt something like obligation.
From his perspective, I know it’s good manners not to ignore a partner whose body is uncomfortable after a night with him. I understand. But—
Manners. Kindness.
At a glance those sound like words grounded in affection, but they also mean treating someone outside a certain line with courtesy.
Maybe I’d been hoping that everything he’d arranged would resemble affection that cares for a lover. That was the nakedness of my feelings—my bare face.
I briefly considered whether returning the ticket would be the ending that preserved my pride, saying I didn’t need kindness universally bestowed on anyone he slept with, and then I let out a hollow laugh. I’m not the lead in a drama...
Suddenly I remembered something he’d said while idly popping the nuts Juhan had set out at the VIP preview. It was nothing—a remark tossed off in passing.
“Can someone clear these away? I don’t even like them, but if they’re in front of me I keep eating them.”
If the first time we slept together had been emergency first aid, then last night’s sex might have been an incident that happened on the same principle as grabbing a handful of nuts.
He’d happened to be irritated after having a sensitive spot poked in a dirty way, I happened to be there trying to improve his mood, and somewhere in that process a sexual atmosphere happened to form... Maybe the fact that we’d once slept together made the temptation easier too. I wasn’t trying to play the victim of the night and cut him down as promiscuous. The one who willingly yielded to that temptation was none other than me.
But if I’d had even a little human fondness for him—if I knew I wouldn’t be fine after sex—then I should have protected myself with more caution in my choice.
The car slowed, approaching the departure gate.
“I hope this business trip becomes a good turning point.”
“...”
I looked over at him, but his face was still turned toward the dark, unlit screen.
“I’ll be expecting a positive answer about the painting.”
I considered for a moment whether a man as seasoned as he was might have his feelings shaken by an impulsive one-night stand. The answer was already there in his manner: the same steady calm as before we spent the night together—no more intimate, not even colder.
The car came to a full stop. His sunglassed face turned toward me. Even then I couldn’t be sure he was really looking at me behind the lenses.
“See you in Seoul.”
Maybe it was just as well I couldn’t confirm his eyes on me.
Sitting in seat 1A—something I might never sit in again as long as I lived—given to me as the price of a night with him, I looked down at the last views of Hong Kong receding far below and, calmly, accepted why my feelings had reacted with unusual intensity where he was concerned.
There was nothing more than a venting of emotion to confirm with my own eyes a conclusion I’d already braced for. So it wasn’t shocking, and it didn’t feel like plummeting to the ground.
I liked him.
The private expectations and disappointments, the atypical sensitivity that made me take things more seriously than they were—unfortunate as it was, they were signals that I liked him.
There wasn’t some clear starting point from which I began to like him. At least for now, I couldn’t name the point.
His way of dealing with me got under my skin; sometimes I felt a rebellious urge; I wanted him to be provoked by me, to show a change in his expression, to look at me again.
Maybe the groundwork for the feeling had started earlier than I’d thought.
It wasn’t strange to dream of him as someone I could date. He wasn’t soft or easy to deal with, but he was undeniably attractive—someone I wanted to know more and get closer to.
It was just that I hadn’t known I might come to feel expectation and desire toward someone else. Much less that I’d indulge the foolish desire to choose, as the target, a dazzling person at the apex who drew everyone’s attention and favor.
The me I knew wanted the bare minimum and chose accordingly to minimize the expenditure of emotions like disappointment or humiliation—a coward.
So did wanting him make me brave?
Not at all. Before I’d properly acknowledged the feeling, I had simply discovered a new side of myself—someone who answered the temptation of sex far too easily.
A flight attendant came over and asked if she could prepare my meal. I stared blankly at a flawless, straight smile, then asked for a beer. In no time, a cold can of beer and a glass were set on the tray table. The world he lived in was like this—where everything appeared at a word, like magic.
Telling me to rest comfortably, the flight attendant slid the door shut and left. Even now, cut off and alone, in that unfamiliar comfort that wasn’t comfortable at all, I started drinking the beer straight from the can.
He’d said after the Old Future shoot that sleeping with someone who isn’t your lover isn’t all messy, and that an adult at this age can’t resolve desire only by masturbating just because they don’t have a lover.
My sister and brother agreed, of course, and although I didn’t say it aloud, I was mostly in agreement too.
Back then I’d wondered whether they could hold that same position even for someone they liked—whether they could avoid being hurt if the person they liked slept with someone else instead of them.
In a sense, my thoughts then were a wildly off-target guess. A person you like can feel devastated even by a night with you, not with someone else.
Maybe what he meant when he said it was a relief I was sturdy was another way of saying he was glad I didn’t confuse impulsive sex with romantic feeling. I smiled bitterly at the late guess.
At some point the lights of Hong Kong had vanished entirely from view.
